Civil Religion Today

by Philip S. Gorski

Does America have a civil religion? Does it need a civil religion? Is civil
religion compatible with a secular society? With religious belief? Building on
Robert Bellah's well-known discussions of American civil religion, and on the
Anglophone tradition of civil religion more broadly, this essay answers in the
affirmative. It shows that the United States has a long and evolving civic
tradition composed of Christian and republican strands and contrasts it with
two other competing traditions: religious nationalism and liberal secularism.
It engages with historical, philosophical, theological and social-scientific
scholarship to develop a descriptive and prescriptive account of the proper
relationship of religion and politics in the U.S. It further argues that the
political rhetoric of Barack Obama may be understood as an attempt to
reconstruct and revive the civil religion tradition.

Philip S. Gorski is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. A comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe, Gorski also serves as Co-Director of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research (CCR).